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What can a lawyer do with $500 for marketing

Sep 15, 2015

As a lawyer marketing agency, we get solicited by lawyers of all shapes and sizes. We’ve had the pleasure of helping some mega-large law firms, and have equally had the pleasure of helping young lawyers and law firms – become extremely visible in a short amount of time.

All too often, we spend time speaking to lawyers – only to find out that their budget is too small for us to realistically do anything with them. Why? Well, simply put – to put in hours of work and to generate results and to create a profit, out of $500, or $750 per month, just doesn’t seem realistic. There is definitely a void, and there are many effective SEO vendors who capitalize on lawyers, and professionals, with that small budget – and deliver value. But all too often, lawyers end up spending $500 a month, for 5-6 months – yet have no results, or value, delivered to them.

This blog post is about addressing that void, and helping lawyers figure out how to best use their budget in order to do their SEO themselves.

PPC

Depending on where you live (city, thus competition), and the practice area – PPC may, or may not be viable. In cities like Los Angeles, personal injury lawyers often spend $100-$200 per click. If you’re a small law firm/attorney, it’s impossible to do PPC. With 2 clicks, your budget would be close to getting burned out.

solution: look around you, at other nearby cities, maybe 1-2-3 hours away, and see what the PPC cost is there. The population might be small, and you will have a low quantity of leads, but the cost will be lower. This is situation, and may not be possible in all places.

solution: explore other practice areas, that you’d be interested in exploring. For example, in NYC personal injury is extremely expensive, but our NYC criminal defense lawyers spend $20-$30 CPC. That’s a huge difference. Some other practice areas like business law have a CPC of $5-$10 in our experience. If you feel comfortable handling those other practice areas, consider changing your advertising focus to those areas in order to create cases + revenue!

Create Content. Adopt a Long Term SEO Strategy.

There are many law firms, who have made a reputation for creating great content and focusing on this – exclusively. On $500 – you could go to a website like TextBroker.com, which is a content creation website. It connects writers to businesses. You can purchase a 4 star article, with a length of 700-800 words, for about $20-$25. You can spend the $500 you have, and purchase 18-22 articles each month. You’re giving Google what it wants – and if you create those articles to target specific long tail keywords – because of the lower competition for those long tail keywords, you could rank without doing much else. We’ve seen examples of lawyers who specifically focus on long tail keywords, and are convinced that long-tail keyword traffic converts at a much higher rate.

This practice of spending the $500 on content each month could be a great way to create meaningful content landing pages, that could rank well in Google eventually. At the very least, your build a foundation for your website. Everyone has their own school of thought, when it comes to SEO. Mine, is that websites that are bigger – and have more content, rank better. I think that the size of your website, influences how perceives your website. For more competitive keywords, Google has a “model,” of how many pages of content a website would have, in the natural world – if it ranked on page 1 of a keyword.

For example, if you google the keywordÂ Los Angeles Personal Injury Lawyer, here are the firms who rank, and their overall size of website (you can verify this yourself, by typing site:domain-name.com into google)

FararLawGroup: 719 pages

WilshireLawfirm: 587 pages

LosAngelesPersonalInjuryLawyers.co: 168 pages

PSBLaw: 5200 pages

As you’ll observe from these firms who rank on page 1 of Google for PI in Los Angeles, size of website definitely seems to be a factor.

Fiverr

You’ll probably never hear any respectable agency recommend going to Fiverr. It’s a cesspool of hundreds of vendors, but if you know what you’re looking for – it can help you accomplish tasks, even on a limited budget of $500. By no means should you go on Fiverr, and pick the first service that offers you generic, “1000 backlinks,” for $5. That’s the quickest way to get a penalty. What you should do is see if there are certain service providers, who are willing to give you their time, and perform a service for you.

For example. There are many writers who freelancer for websites like Examiner.com – which is a reputable news website. For a fee, they are willing to give you their time, and will attempt to publish content on your behalf. Often, they will charge a fee to write the article for you – or they’ll accept your content and charge you a fee for “attempting to,” publish the article.

In man cases, the lawyer SEO company you hire might be doing the same thing and going on Fiverr! Crazy to hear that, but it’s true. Marketplaces like Fiverr are a huge opportunity in disguise IF you know what you’re looking for. On a budget of $500, you could purchase the time/services of a microworker who can help you create high quality backlinks. Obviously, this is more time consuming – but if you’re willing to take a more active role in your marketing efforts, there are market places who will put you in touch with workers willing to perform micro-services for you. If you do it long enough, it’s possible you could make headway – enough to validate a further investment.

tip: please, for heavens sake, do not purchase 1000, 3000, or 5000 bulk backlinks. it doesn’t work. do not user fiverr to purchase bulk backlinks, you will kill your website!